Out from Under the Cloud

Howard Mechanic is sitting quietly on a worn couch in an old house in Prescott, peeling an orange and waiting for the start of a Peace and Justice meeting.
Anyone who lived through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and ’70s attended countless meetings in old houses just like this: a mishmash of furniture that probably came from the Salvation Army, walls covered with psychedelic paintings, and signs extolling the virtues of peace propped here and there. It has the feel of déjà vu all over again.
This must feel like a time warp to Howard Mechanic. Because he isn’t just any middle-aged man protesting American military presence abroad, he’s the man who was hunted for 28 years by the FBI for protesting the Vietnam War. He’s the guy who ran rather than serve a prison term for a crime he insists he didn’t commit, and which it now appears he didn’t.
He’s the man who pretended for nearly three decades he was somebody else – an orphaned only child with no family to ex-plain – until his drive for community service outed him and put him behind bars.
His friends called him “America’s last prisoner of war from Nixon’s Vietnam.” And he’d be in prison right now if it weren’t for a pardon on the very last day that William Jefferson Clinton was president of the United States.
Today, he’s a free man with all of his civil rights and he’s making a new life for himself and his girlfriend in Prescott. He still has friends in Scottsdale, where he hid out for so many years and was known and respected as Gary Tredway, but he prefers the small “progressive” town in Central Arizona where he’s already well known by the City Council for his environmental activism.
And so he sits there, peeling the orange, ready to plan a protest – there is nowhere else that Howard Mechanic would rather be.

To this day, Howard Mechanic doesn’t think he wanted to get caught, but what he did in the first days of 2000 suggests he’s in denial.
He spent 28 years living under the assumed name of Gary Tredway, and making a name for himself as a community activist – he helped organize the campaign that took Arizona to the forefront of the Clean Elections movement. And it was that zeal that led him to run for the Scottsdale City Council, because, he said, “It’s important to me to be involved in the community.”
His girlfriend, Janet Grossman, who’d loved him long before she knew anything about his concealed past, was clued in by now and thought this was a reckless idea. But he assured her it would be fine. “I knew there was a risk, but I didn’t think it was as high as it was,” he says now.
When Scottsdale Tribune reporter Penny Overton came to do a basic profile story and said the paper would do a standard background check, Tredway panicked. He also broke out in such a sweat that he soaked his shirt, the reporter would later recall.
He called her back (she thought it was because he was so “white bread” and he didn’t want the story to say he was living with a girlfriend), only to be told the truth – that Tredway really was a fugitive from the Vietnam War, running from a five-year prison sentence for a crime he said he didn’t commit. “He asked her not to tell anyone,” Grossman remembers, “and I knew that wasn’t going to work. I’ve always felt badly that we put her into such a horrible position.”
The reporter agonized over the story during a weekend away hiking, only to return to find that Tredway had withdrawn from the race, claiming he had leukemia. In the web he was trying to spin that had no anchor points anymore, he thought this newest lie would make everything go away.
But instead of giving him an out, it made Overton furious. She spat out something like, “He’s not sick, he’s lying,” and wrote her story, exposing all his lies.
Her story was quickly picked up everywhere. The Republic’s front-page headline screamed: “Scottsdale Candidate Awash in Lies.” The New York Times Sunday Magazine would eventually ask: “Doesn’t Anybody Know How to be a Fugitive Anymore?” Dateline on NBC titled its story, The Fugitive.
“We had no idea how big a story this would become,” Grossman remembers. Nor were they prepared for the first news reports that claimed Mechanic was wanted as an “arsonist” and was “armed and dangerous.” None of that had ever been true. He’d never been accused of arson – he was not known to ever carry a weapon.
He’d been arrested when he was a 22-year-old senior at Washington University in St. Louis for throwing a cherry bomb during a violent protest the night after the Kent State killings. The arrest took place as the ROTC building on campus burned to the ground.
As his friends would later tell anyone in the media who asked, Mechanic was opposed to the war and was active in student protests, but he wasn’t one of the campus leaders in the anti-war movement. Yet, he was one of seven students named by the university in a restraining order, demanding they stay away from campus protests.
And then the National Guard killed four students at Kent State, and campuses across the nation erupted in a rage not seen before or since in the protest movement.
The night of May 5, 1970, would forever change Howard Mechanic’s life. Ignoring the restraining order, he went to the protest at the ROTC building. Police arrested several protesters, including Mechanic and his friend, Larry Kogan. They became the first students ever charged under President Nixon’s new weapon: the Civil Obedience Act of 1968.
Only one witness fingered them. In fact, the witness – a law student who despised the protesters – testified that he clearly saw Kogan throw a firecracker; the second one “could have” come from Mechanic or from someone standing behind him. Four others testified they were with Mechanic that night, and he never threw anything. Juries convicted both men.
Kogan was given 90 days, sentenced under the Youth Offender Act. But Mechanic’s judge sentenced him under the new Civil Obedience Act and gave him the max. Mechanic served six months for violating the restraining order and appealed the long prison sentence and the flimsy evidence of his conviction. (“A lot of the guards were ex-military, and they considered me a traitor,” Mechanic remembers. “One said he’d like to put a bullet in my head.”)
While waiting for the appeal, Mechanic finished college, but the felony wrap ended his dreams of becoming a public-interest lawyer. When the appeals court upheld the ruling in 1972, Mechanic sold his boyhood stamp collection for about $3,500, abandoned his friends and family – father, mother, sister, twin brother – and took a Greyhound bus out of town, expecting never to answer to the name Howard Mechanic again.
He landed in Tempe, took the name Gary Tredway, and started a new life. Long a vegetarian, he took a job at a food co-op, where he met his wife. They had one son. (“Gary” insisted the boy carry his mother’s last name.) They divorced, and Mechanic placed an ad in New Times looking for a “left-leaning, non-smoking vegetarian.” Janet Grossman answered the ad. He started three businesses, including an apartment complex that used solar heating, and began volunteering. He also gave 25 percent of his income to charity.
By 2000, Mechanic was so highly regarded in his new community of Scottsdale that he followed his friends’ urging to run for City Council. And then all hell broke loose. He turned himself in on February 10, 2000, and was immediately sent to prison to serve out his term, only to see new charges piled on top – for faking his identity and getting public documents (like his driver’s license and a passport) under an assumed name.
“At first they tried to make me out a real bad guy, saying I was wanted for arson, when I never had been,” he says. “But imagine if the federal marshals said, ‘We’re looking for a guy for 30 years for throwing a firecracker.’ The press would have started laughing.”
As the facts unfolded, nobody was laughing at the heavy hand that decided Howard Mechanic should give up five years with such weak evidence while his co-defendant got just three months, before receiving a full pardon from Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Many saw Mechanic’s conviction a result of the hysteria in the country at the time, when being a long-haired, bearded protester put you on the enemies list. And of course, Howard Mechanic wasn’t in line for a pardon from Ronald Reagan in 1981 because he was still on the lam, hiding out in plain sight in Scottsdale, Arizona.
But if anyone needed further proof that it was time to say Howard Mechanic’s nightmare should be over, it was given in the Dateline story, in which reporters traveled the country to interview everyone involved in the case. The most telling interview came from Kogan, who today is a respected psychotherapist in St. Louis.
Kogan told Dateline he was standing next to Mechanic during the protest, and he knows Mechanic didn’t throw a cherry bomb. “Who threw it?” Kogan was asked. “I did,” he admitted. (Mechanic says he never knew Kogan had thrown a firecracker until he admitted it on national television.)
And if anyone needs a measure of how much respect Gary Tredway-Howard Mechanic had built up in his adopted city over all those years, consider that he was behind bars when Scottsdale held its city election, and he still got 1,300 votes.
It’s probably no coincidence that through it all, Howard Mechanic has adopted a demeanor of detachment. You know he has to feel strongly about things, but you won’t get any emotional displays from him.
He’ll say it was “hard” to know his mother was being buried and he couldn’t be there, but ask him what he did the day of her funeral and he just says, “I can’t remember.” He admits to decades of the same nightmare of getting caught, but he says it without any variation in his monotone voice.
Mechanic has a nice smile, but you have to work for it. He doesn’t rise to anger, even when asked an outrageous question like: “Do you make love to your girlfriend the night before you turn yourself in?” (He prefers to say, “We hugged a lot.”)
Howard Mechanic lived a lot of years afraid something would give him away, and what he harnessed to protect himself were his emotions.

Janet Grossman learned the secret when she became convinced Gary Tredway was trying to dump her. Although she’s refused to discuss this in previous interviews, she admits what happened in an interview with PHOENIX Magazine. “He didn’t want me to meet his family, and I thought he wasn’t serious about our relationship – he had to come clean or I was gone,” she says.
She had met an “uncle and cousin” (who actually were his dad and sister), and knew there was another “cousin” who he refused to let her meet. She would eventually learn that this “cousin” was his twin brother, and if she ever saw him, she’d know her boyfriend was lying to her about these relationships. But at the time, she only knew that she was being shut out of her boyfriend’s flimsy family and, in her insecurity about the relationship, that signaled his lack of real interest.
She remembers it took “like two minutes” for him to explain he’d been on the run for decades, and she didn’t ask any questions, probably, she says on reflection, “Because my reaction was, ‘Oh, it’s not about me at all.'” That night in bed, they were almost asleep when she rolled over and asked, “What was your name?”
Ironically, she’d always loved everything about the guy except his name. “Gary” just wasn’t a name she’d choose for her man. But “Howard” was, even though she thought then that she’d never be able to use it.
When he told her he wanted to run for the Scottsdale City Council, Grossman warned him that they were treading into dangerous territory. “But he thought it would be OK, so I supported him,” she says. And she has supported him ever since.
Grossman was a leading force in the army of friends and associates who worked tirelessly for his pardon. She took over his businesses – “I knew nothing about any of them” – and kept up her own career working full time for a housing agency. “There was constant stress, and I always felt like no matter what I did, it was not enough,” she says. “There was always something over my head.”
Grossman drove to Florence every week to visit Mechanic in prison, finding the hour-and-a-half drive the only “free” time she had – she used the time to listen to books on tape. “It would have been easier on both of us if I’d been the one locked up so I could read books for a year [while] he was working to get me out of prison,” she says. “I managed, but I didn’t do as well as I wish I could have.”
If Mechanic’s emotions seem locked up tight with the key thrown away, Grossman’s are right on the table. She admits she cries easily, and from her telling, it happens too often – although it’s hard to criticize someone for revealing emotions that are so genuine. “I kept feeling guilty every time I talked to Howard in prison, because I was crying,” she says. “I still feel badly because I wanted to be a rock for him, but I kept crying.”
It’s easy to imagine how overwhelming this became, and so very gently, the question is broached: How bad did it get? And through her tears, Grossman tells that it got so bad, friends thought she wouldn’t survive. And through her tears, Grossman tells that it got about as bad as it can get. “One day my best friend from high school took me to be tested for suicidal tendencies. I wasn’t suicidal, but it was that bad. I had situational depression, and the doctor told me, ‘When he gets out, you’ll be done.'”
In the meantime, she took St. John’s Wort for the depression, and another herb to help her sleep – the combination worked amazingly well. “It was the only way I functioned,” she says.
But there was never any question that she’d stick – just as there had never been any question that they’d run when his secret was found out. “You know,” she says, “from 1976 to now, there was only one year when there was even a chance for a pardon for Howard, and it was the year he got the pardon.” She finds some justice in that.
“I wouldn’t wish this on anybody,” she says. “But it’s over now. I was prepared to live the rest of our lives with the tension that he’d someday be caught. It’s wonderful that that’s not hanging over us anymore.”

You wouldn’t expect a Vietnam veteran to be defending Vietnam protester Howard Mechanic, but that’s exactly what happened.
Tom Hoidal had completed one year at Georgetown Law School in 1968 when he was drafted. He was first assigned to the infantry’s First Division, but when they found out he was a college kid, he was transferred to the 25th Division as a clerk.
He’s now a Phoenix attorney, and when a friend called saying this guy in Scottsdale was really a 30-year fugitive, Hoidal says he had no hesitation in taking the case.
But then, he had seen the war from the inside, and it had turned his stomach as much as it did the protesters’. “I wish there would have been a hundred thousand Howard Mechanics,” he says over lunch at Alexi’s. “If there had been, maybe there wouldn’t be 50,000 names on the memorial wall in Washington.”
And so he went to work, trying to handle the old federal charges out of Missouri, as well as new charges heaped on in Arizona. The best hope, he thought, was a commutation of the original sentence. (It would get Mechanic out of prison, but let the felony stand, limiting his rights as a citizen.)
But Mechanic’s college friends – some now successful professionals who used all their influence – decided to go for broke and seek a pardon. “They went through what I went through,” Mechanic says. “We’d been separated for 30 years, and now we came back together.”
At the top of the list is his friend Ben Zaricor, who’d been student council president during the protests, but now has a successful herbal import business in California. (The two had contact over the years, since Zaricor recognized Mechanic at a health-food convention in San Diego in the 1970s, and they even did some business together.) “God Bless them for going after the pardon,” Hoidal says. “But it looked like a long shot.”
Athia Hardt took over the public relations part of the campaign and handled the media requests that poured in. She also became a rock for Grossman. “What I couldn’t understand is how anyone could look at this case and think he deserved to be in prison,” Hardt says.
The campaign they mounted to convince President Clinton was impressive:

• Washington University officially supported the pardon.
• The City Council of University City, Missouri, passed a resolution of support.
• William H. Danforth, who was chancellor of Washington University when the incident occurred in 1970, cited three factors in supporting the pardon: that Mechanic was a young man at the time, that he had lived a “responsible and productive life since,” and that his co-defendant had been given such a small sentence in comparison.
• Former Senator Thomas F. Eagleton said: “The Vietnam War was a terrible low point in our nation’s history because it divided our country so profoundly and caused thousands of people, young and old, to question the legitimacy of our government…. I view the Mechanic matter as a 30-year-old leftover from the war and another wound that should also be healed.”
• Professor Carter Revard, saying he was in “firm support” while writing as an “aggrieved party” in the case, wrote one of the most touching letters. Revard and his wife put up their house to guarantee the $10,000 bail that was forfeited when Mechanic skipped, but many came forward to cover the debt, including Mechanic’s family: “He has behaved, in all respects except his misguided ways of protesting, and his panicking and running away, as a good American citizen should act. His actions have cost me some money and considerable worry, but the actions of our presidents and their administrations from 1954 to 1972 cost me and all citizens of this country… far more in money and in misery than can ever be made up. Moreover, if John McCain could go to Vietnam and try to reconcile with the people there, surely prosecutors can do something comparable with American citizens here.” (McCain is Arizona’s senior senator and a former prisoner of war in Vietnam.)
• Perhaps the most convincing letter of all came from Robert O. Muller, a Marine who founded the Vietnam Veterans of America and its foundation, which operates clinics for disabled persons in Vietnam, Hanoi and Cambodia. Muller was paralyzed from the chest down while leading an assault in 1969: “Forcing Howard Mechanic to serve out a five-year sentence for an act (based on questionable evidence) that harmed no one is [an] injustice of the most draconian kind…. The Vietnam War era was one of the most turbulent in our history…. The time for reconciliation and healing is long past.”

Howard Mechanic’s pardon, dated January 20, 2001

       Mechanic and Grossman now live in a nice neighborhood of Prescott in a split-level home with an American flag plaque on the front wall. At the bottom of the stairs in the basement is the framed pronouncement from President Clinton dated January 20, 2001, which gave Mechanic a “full and unconditional” pardon that re-stored him to full citizenship. (Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington has a similar certificate somewhere in his house. He was pardoned the same day, as were some 140 others.)
Mechanic hangs his next to another important declaration, a plaque from the “Kent May 4 Center,” which reads: “Our deepest appreciation for your solidarity with and concern for the students of Kent State in May 1970 and for enduring so much hardship for the cause of peace and justice. We present this plaque in recognition of your extraordinary sacrifice and dedication on behalf of the movement for a better America.”
You can tell right away that the people who live here spend their money on something other than things. Except for the giant television and the state-of-the-art computer system that dominates what probably was once a dining cove, the only major pieces of furniture are his-and-hers recliner chairs, each with a table lamp. The tables are covered with magazines that speak to the politics of this couple: from Greenpeace, from the Sierra Club, from health-food co-ops. Next to Grossman’s chair are paperback books to feed a habit she can’t get enough of. Mechanic’s not much of a book reader.
The house has the smell of herbs, which is the first clue that the inhabitants are vegans, who not only eat no meat, they also eat no eggs or dairy products. The vegetables that comprise the major part of their diet are picked each Wednesday at Prescott College, where they’re members of the Community Supported Agriculture Project, paying a yearly fee to have a regular supply of organic food.
The computer niche is where Howard Mechanic runs his mail-order business, and where he’s written the autobiography that’s still awaiting a publisher. This is a man who knows his way around the computer world, and uses it to keep up with Radio Nation (a program produced by Nation magazine), as well as Democracy Now and Counterspin (a program produced by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).
Grossman walks to work at the West Yavapai Guidance Clinic, where she’s a case manager. They’re both active in the Prescott Union for Peace and Justice, and Mechanic volunteers with Habitat for Humanity and Stepping Stones, a support program for abused women and children.
He’s a consummate second-hand shopper and has found some incredible deals for the agencies he works with – a fabulous stove and refrigerator for friends opening a vegan restaurant in the historic part of town; computer equipment he repairs; old optometry equipment a charity was offering for $100, which he sold for them on eBay for $3,800.
It’s not uncommon to find Mechanic at a Prescott City Council meeting, where he often speaks out for the Open Space Alliance, which is trying to preserve more of the land around Prescott, and questions city subsidies for businesses.
Grossman’s folks live nearby – “I knew they’d be shocked when they found out who Howard was, but I never questioned they’d be supportive,” she recalls – and both say they like Prescott a lot.
“We’ve found a small progressive group of people we associate with,” he says. “If you have 12 dedicated people, you can get a lot done in a community.”
Mechanic worries about the direction the country is going. “The government right now is working to help the richest people,” he says. “Not the people most vulnerable.” And he wonders why so many children live in poverty and so many have no healthcare, even though they live in the richest country on the planet. He’d like to see a “more egalitarian system,” instead of the great divide between the haves and have-nots that exists today.
And he wants to be remembered, not for being the last fugitive from the Vietnam War, but for what he has done with his life in the years since that pivotal day at Washington University in 1970: “I want people to think of me as someone who’s dedicated, trying to help solve some problems.”
And so most weeks, you’ll find him and his girlfriend sitting on a worn couch in an old house in downtown Prescott, waiting for the start of a Peace and Justice meeting – this free man with all his civil rights, and his belief that being a good American means you never shut up when you think your government is wrong.